In Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002), the absurdity of explosive apricot pits and flying fedayeen ninjas meets the silent senselessness of rearranging Palestinian backyard waste and passengers in cars at the Israeli checkpoint. Suleiman’s use of political and cinematic inertia combined with bursts of absurdity constitute a “cinematic manifesto” (Halabi, 2017: 115) against political, cultural, and geographical oppression. His political protest is not exclusively targeting the Israeli side, but every kind of hegemonic establishment, from nationalism, imperialism, racism, geographical borders, religious fanaticism, and, most of all, the inherent boundaries of the self. His own political insufficiency as a Palestinian in exile and his paradoxical spatial and psychological ‘absent presence’ is foregrounded with self-reflexivity in his films, emphasizing his contribution in this evermore political hibernation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In this essay, I will demonstrate, referencing audiovisual aesthetics of the film, how Suleiman’s powerful use of satire and poetic silence simultaneously oppose any form of oppression while embracing the need for cultural expression.

Suleiman’s satirical absurdity arises from the need for freedom (Rahman, 2015: 57). Through self-reflection and sarcasm one can break out of imposed boundaries and critically re-evaluate ideologies, or even reject them once and for all. Suleiman employs silent gags in a repetitive manner in the film, a “choreography of the banality of life… reminiscent of Buster Keaton or Tati” (Gourgouris, 2015: 39-40), where Palestinians damp their garbage bags in their neighbours’ backyards, futilely rearrange their waste in their own yards, and wait in vain for a bus that is never meant to arrive. Potholes are cemented and fixed only to get destroyed all over again by pure rage, a rage that seems to know how to use a measuring tape better than the “state” officials that tried to fix it in the first place while being observed by useless policemen. A French tourist, a satirical representation of the colonial naiveté and exoticism for the Orient, receives assistance for directions from a blindfolded Palestinian captive instead of the Israeli policeman, who ironically recognises the valuable knowledge his captive holds.  Contrary to MacCabe’s (2001: 210) suggestion that the satirist’s approach turns “the techniques for the production of alienation effects into pure narcissistic signals of an ‘intellectual’ work of ‘art’”, feeding the endless vicious circle of a passive ideology that “we can do nothing against the relentless and evil progress of society … except note our superiority to it”, Suleiman’s irony is a constructive protest with tough love and respect for humanity. As Gourgouris  (2015: 41) describes, “the banality of daily life is prime political ground”. More importantly, he does not exclude himself out of the equation, protagonist in pain, violence, love and loss; his presence is louder than his absent words.

Silence can be a weapon for the oppressed, a humane aggression, a powerful sign of endurance. Cinematically, “any use of the term silence must be qualified or assumed to be ironical” (Schafer, 1994: 256), and since irony is a political protest in Divine Intervention, “the absence of speech… is an inherently political act” (Halabi, 2017: 117); Palestinians suffer silently, get arrested silently, stare inactively others getting arrested, lose their possessions while indifferently watching a football game, lovers flirt without exchanging any words, and stare at the pressure pot steaming. This stagnant attitude, waiting around in silence for nothing to happen, is louder than an explosion. It does not only represent the political inertia of the conflict, but it accentuates the premonition of the outburst. Aesthetically, it simultaneously discharges comic bullets and dramatizes pain and loss. Suleiman’s combination of silent gags and explosions of absurdity annihilate the essence of time, creating the notion that Palestinians are “trapped in a kind of eternal present with no reference to the past, history, or future … an ahistorical façade” (Abu-Remaileh, 2015: 81).

At the same time, action is sarcastically rejected or juxtaposed with romance and love. Every time the couple meets at the checkpoint and later when they cross the border, bombs explode, when the female protagonist passes in front of the checkpoint the tower collapses, and the female fedayeen ninja, in a semiotic manner, from target turns into the weapon. Suleiman’s female characters become his “fantastical projections and a counterweight to his own inactivity and escapism … [questioning] the concept of action and resistance” (Abu-Remaileh, 2015: 92).

History is a catalyst for the concept of a nation, which is central in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And both history and national identity in Middle East are inextricably linked with colonialism. Undoubtedly, “the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Said, 2006: 26), and Suleiman’s anti-orientalist cinaesthetics create “new ways of seeing a colonial structure in its painfully absurd effects” (Rahman, 2015: 64). Yasser Arafat’s red balloon illegally crosses the checkpoint, humiliating the Israeli troops, and hovers over Jerusalem, dancing above Orthodox and Catholic Christian churches, Muslim Mosques, and ancient ruins; a never-ending change of power which uses religion to manipulate the masses. The Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint pointlessly rearrange drivers and passengers in the cars, just because they can, in the same way imperialism for centuries upon centuries meaninglessly tortured the oppressed. Yet Suleiman’s comic reaction to the oppressor is an anti-orientalist Oriental version of the Western song “I Put a Spell on You”, with E.S. in the driver’s seat at the traffic light blankly staring at an Israeli nationalist. Suleiman goes “against prevalent narrations of Palestinian identity… [revealing] the real possibility that politics will rupture consensus in the face of continued fragmentation of geography, people, and memory” (Rahman, 2015: 70).

Suleiman’s artistic choice and satirical expression of misplacing violence and action with silence and inertia, reconstructs the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the realm of the absurd; whose point-of-view is he representing? Is it the Palestinian, the Israeli, the Western, or his own? If there exists the notion of true protest, a pure resistance, there should not be any break in the symmetry of identity representation, or in an even more rebellious sense, no identification whatsoever. Suleiman proves with his film that if there is one way to break out of futile conflicts and restrictive mentalities the answer lies with satire and self-sarcasm.    

Filmography

Suleiman, Elia, Yadon Iaheyya/Divine Intervention, 2002. Film. FR/DE/MOR/NL/USA

 Bibliography

Abu-Remaileh, R. (2015) ‘Narrating Negative Space (Palestine)’, in Ten Arab Filmmakers : Political Dissent and Social Critique. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 76–97.

Gourgouris, S. (2015) ‘Dream-Work of Dispossession: The Instance of Elia Suleiman’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 44(4), pp. 32–47.

Halabi, Z. (2017) ‘The Banality of Exile: Elia Suleiman and the Silenced Exile’, in The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 96–130.

MacCabe, C. (2001) ‘Realism and the Cinema: notes on some Brechtian Theses’, in Hollows, J., Hutchings, P., and Jancovich, M. (eds) The Film Studies Reader. London: Arnold, pp. 206–212.

Rahman, N. (2015) ‘“A Coming to Language”: The Cinema of Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, and Rashid Masharawi’, in In the Wake of the Poetic. New York: Syracuse University Press (Palestinian Artists After Darwish), pp. 53–75.

Said, E.W. (2006) ‘Orientalism’, in Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (eds) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. 2nd edn. Oxford, New York: Routledge, pp. 24–27.

Schafer, M. (1994) ‘Silence’, in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, pp. 253–259.